The Holesky testnet for Ethereum achieved finality on Monday, nearly two weeks following the activation of the Pectra upgrade.
Epoch 119,090 confirmed this milestone at approximately 19:00 UTC, with more than two-thirds of validators participating in the network validation. An epoch represents a timeframe during which a designated number of blocks are finalized on the blockchain.
Finality, which guarantees that transactions become irreversible within two epochs, roughly equivalent to 13 minutes, had been missing since February 24 due to a configuration issue within the client software, rather than the Pectra upgrade itself.
Efforts to restore the network over recent weeks led to this recovery. Developers are now focused on stabilizing nodes and cleaning up outdated states to fully reactivate the testnet for continued Pectra testing.
Meanwhile, the Sepolia testnet, which is also implementing Pectra, achieved finality but subsequently encountered problems with empty blocks due to a defective deposit contract. An attacker took advantage of this flaw by conducting zero-token transfers, as developers observed. This situation was eventually rectified by client teams.
The Pectra upgrade brings significant improvements, including the ability to pay gas fees using tokens other than ETH, account abstraction, and increased staking limits.